So, the jobless occupiers of downtown Vancouver, and cities around North America, have told the powers that be that they have no intention of picking up their North Face tent shanty towns and making themselves scarce. Not until their demands are met, that is. What those demands are, nobody has yet guessed, not even the occupiers.

At first, the OWS protests were kind of interesting. There was some validity to the whole idea, after all. Rejecting corporate welfare, the concept of wealth disparity, and pointing out America’s abysmal failure to generate anything resembling “stimulus” with wasteful bailouts of the wealthiest and greediest corporations are all fairly valid things to protest.

But even the unwashed hippies of the sixties knew better than to just sit on a street corner for a month and whine about life. That’s not so much activism as it is deliberately choosing to be homeless.

At this point the occupiers have very much lived up to their names. There is a difference between a child who resists adult abuse of authority and a child who stands in one place and refuses to move, regardless of how much it is cajoled and coaxed. At a certain point the child ceases to be acting in defiance based on principle, and is just a petulant brat who needs his tantrum ended as soon as possible.

The occupiers fall into that latter camp. There needs to be a point to continuing, beyond the drain on the municipal budgets of the cities forced to clean up after them, or else it’s simply an occupation by a hostile force with no intent to move. Ironically, these same aimless people are the ones who would most vociferously insist we’re not helping Afghanistan become peaceful fast enough, and are just pointlessly “occupying” it.

If anybody can claim to be pointlessly occupying anything it’s these people in their tents, who — rather than do something useful like go to school, take job training, or actively assist in reaching social goals — have decided to blame forces outside their control, the so-called one percent. At the heart of this slacker ethic is a purely anarchist philosophy, which takes an ambivalent stance on prosperity or ruin, choosing simply to stand in one place and bitch about how awful the world is.

Of course, Vancouver’s favourite bicycle lane mayor has no intention of forcing the issue with the occupiers during an election year, least of all amongst his street-squatting base.

And what, really, do the occupiers expect politicians to do for them, even if they do get around to articulating a demand? For these people nothing will really satisfy. Short of getting out of Afghanistan, shuttering corporate America, freeing Palestine, solving world hunger and raising everybody’s wage to a “liveable” one, they’re not really going to be satisfied. Setting the bar at this level, the occupiers may as well register title on the streets of Vancouver and just stay there. That might actually bring the housing prices down to a reasonable level at least.

The frustrating thing is that while the city feels some kind of misguided obligation toward protecting the health, safety and well-being of the occupiers, the municipal budget is bleeding with cost overruns for this unplanned expense. I mean, you don’t think the occupiers are cleaning up after themselves, right?

What’s worse is that this takes services away from the people who actually need it. The people who are actually poor. The people who actually need help. Not the preposterous occupiers, idling their twenty-something lives away on some misguided misadventure to nobody’s apparent benefit.